Photographic work takes out Alice Prize

Landscape photographer Catherine Rogers has taken out this year's Alice Prize with her work Fallout #56

The artwork is made up of images taken at Maralinga, the site in remote South Australia where nuclear tests were carried out during the 1950s.

It's the first time a photographic work has won Alice Springs' national art competition in over a decade.

Speaking to ABC's Nadine Maloney this morning, Ms Rogers says she was dumbfounded when she found out she had won.

"I'm really honoured, I never expected to win a prize like this."

Ms Rogers says the piece was inspired by a trip to Maralinga last year, and time spent thinking about the history of the place.

"I'm a landscape photographer so this idea of a bombed landscape is appealing but then I saw a couple of the remaining buildings in this sea of concrete pads where many buildings once stood...", she says.

"It was a photographer's delight really."

The three-part work, which will be acquired by Alice Springs Art Foundation, is made up of three parts.

"There's a photograph on the left, and a very thin strip of another photograph and another larger photograph," says Ms Rogers.

"The very thin strip in the middle, which is only a centimetre wide, is a sunrise out the back of Maralinga but it could be misread as a bomb test.

"[It's] is about the layers of the people that have been there and either were part of Maralinga and the bomb-testing or cleaning up, and other people who have just moved through," she says.

Dr Michael Brand, the Director of the Art Gallery of NSW, judged this year's event, which attracted a record number of entries.

(The Alice Prize exhibition can be viewed at the Araluen Arts Centre until June 9)